For everything from family to computers…
In the movie Fantastic Voyage, a crack surgical team is miniaturized inside a ship. Their mission: to destroy a blood clot in the brain of a Soviet-era informant. Given the relatively vast distances covered inside the body, however, movie makers probably should have equipped vessel with rocket motors instead of propellers — and engineers have now designed nanorockets that would’ve fit the bill.
from Wired Top Stories
Mobile World Congress, Europe’s biggest mobile tech conference, was the site of Nokia’s ruthless mining of the world’s natural megapixel reserves. The Finnish company (who’s lately started making phones we really like) announced the 808, a smartphone with a 41-megapixel camera, along with a sensor and flash big enough to feel at home in a point-and-shoot. According to our photog brothers at Popular Photography, that’ll give the phone better digital zoom capabilities and hopefully better image quality–Nokia has a new system to take all those pixels and turn them into nicer, smaller pictures. (Oddly, the phone will use, of all things, the very dead and very awful Symbian OS.) Read more over at Pop Photo.
from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now
All the military funding in the world won’t be able buy fuel when the world’s oil supplies are depleted. So the U.S. Army has commissioned a new hybrid electric tank that’s not unlike a war-friendly version of the Prius. More »
from Gizmodo
We’ve not even seen the devices yet, but HTC CEO Peter Chou is very excited about the camera sensor inside his mysterious new phones. The module packs a f/2.0 camera lens, while the company’s been busy crafting its own image sensor put behind it, called the HTC, er, “ImageChip.” It’ll help to clarify low-lit pictures and ensure a capture speed of under a second — 0.7 seconds from starting up the camera app, in fact. It also has the tantalizing ability to shoot pictures while recording continuous-focus 1080p video. Add in a new LED flash that has five different levels of brightness control and as you might be able to guess, we really want to see these phones — now.
from Engadget
from Engadget
Engineers at the University of Pennsylvaniahave flipped the switch on a new type of computer circuit. Unlike conventional silicon, the new chip uses light — not electricity — to perform its logic. By creating an array of nano-rods, light-flow can be treated like voltage and current. These rods can then be configured to emulate electrical components such as resistors, inductors and capacitors. The benefits of the so-called “metatronic” system would be smaller, faster and more efficient computer chips, which is clearly a welcome prospect. Another curious property the team discovered, is what it calls “stereo-circuitry.” Effectively one set of nano-rods can act as two different circuits, depending on the plane of the field. This means your CPU could become a GPU just by changing the signal. We can’t speak for the light itself, but our minds are certainly bent.
from Engadget
from Engadget